Installation of new wind power capacity in the United States is expected to decline 39 percent this year, according to a report released Thursday.

Now that would be a brutal blow for any industry battered by a vicious recession. But it’s particularly bad news for the American wind industry, which had defied the downturn by installing a record 10,000 megawatts of new capacity in 2009. New wind capacity had grown an average 39 percent annually over the previous five years and represented 39 percent of all new electrical generation that came online last year.

China, meanwhile, has become the world wind leader and is projected to install 14,000 megawatts of new capacity this year, a 25 percent spike from 2009, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a renewable power research and consulting firm.

“Approximately one in two wind turbines to go online in 2010 will be in China,” the Bloomberg report states. “The U.S. market continues to be challenged by fallout from the financial crisis, low power prices and an uncertain medium-to-long term policy environment.”

In other words, the inability of the United States to enact federal climate change legislation or a national renewable energy standard and its Lucy-Charlie-Brown-and-the-football approach to financial incentives for wind power — no, really I won’t yank those tax breaks away this time, come on kick the ball — has made investing in multibillion-dollar wind projects a gamble.

China, on the other hand, has poured billions into its domestic wind industry with the avowed goal of becoming a global leader in the industry. It’s largely because of Chinese demand that new worldwide capacity only declined an estimated 2 percent in 2010.

“The emergence of China as the world’s leading wind market in the last two years is driving a fundamental rebalancing of industrial focus,” William Young, Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s chief of wind industry research, said in a statement. “Chinese turbine manufacturers have muscled their way onto the top table.”

So is the U.S. just tilting at turbines?

In the U.S., plummeting natural gas prices may be just as a big a culprit as a dysfunctional political system. When natural gas-fired electricity is dirt cheap, utilities think twice about signing contracts to buy much more expensive wind power — especially if they’re located in a state without a strong mandate to purchase renewable energy.

On Wednesday, I happened to be talking to Stuart Hemphill, senior vice president of power procurement at utility Southern California Edison, about the impact of low natural gas prices on the competitiveness of renewable energy projects.

Hemphill noted that over the past couple of years, natural gas prices have plunged from $14 per million BTU to $2 per million BTU.

“Natural gas as fuel has become extraordinarily competitive,” he said, noting that the boom in shale gas production is contributing to the downward pressure on prices.

There was some good news in the Bloomberg New Energy Finance report: The industry should bounce back in 2011. The question, of course, is just where that bounce back will happen.

photo: Todd Woody

The United States is on the verge of a solar boom that could provide 4.3 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2020, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

There’s just a 12-figure catch: Investors need to put $100 billion into the solar industry to keep the generation of solar electricity growing by 42 percent a year for the next decade to expand capacity from the current 1.4 gigawatts to 44 gigawatts.

“Policy measures such as tax credits, capital expenditure grants, generation incentives and renewable electricity credits will remain a key driver of solar uptake in the U.S. for at least the next three years,” according to the report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research and consulting firm. “The current drop in solar costs is taking place just as such policies are being implemented by the federal and various state governments, which is expected to lead to rapid growth in commercial, utility and residential solar power.”

Over the past two years, solar module prices have plunged by 50 percent as low-cost Chinese manufacturers expanded production and entered the U.S. market.

“Policy, rather than sunshine, will remain the U.S.’s greatest solar resource for the next few years,” Milo Sjardin, Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s head of U.S. research, said in a statement. “By the middle of this decade, however, the U.S. retail solar market will be driven by fundamental, unsubsidized competition, which should transform the U.S. into one of the world’s most dynamic solar markets.”

Exhibit A for such a phenomenon is Germany. With about as much sunshine as Maine, the European nation became the world’s solar stronghold through policies that rewarded homeowners, businesses, and farmers for generating their own electricity.

Such policies are needed in the U.S., according to the report, given that solar electricity remains four times as expensive to generate than coal-fired power.

Of course, the failure of Congress to pass national climate change legislation and the current attempt to kill California’s global warming law shows that progress on green energy issues is not guaranteed in the U.S. And Congress’ habit of offering short-lived tax incentives for renewable energy and then dithering about extending them when they expire has played havoc with the industry and investors.

That might be a conservative estimate, if the California and federal officials’ rush to green light big solar projects in recent weeks is any indication. On Monday, for instance, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved a 1,000-megawatt solar thermal power plant to be built in the Southern California desert.

By year’s end, nearly four gigawatts of solar thermal projects are expected to be licensed. Just 10 gigawatts to go until 2020.

As we know, one of the few beneficial side effects of the Great Recession of 2009 was the decline in global greenhouse gas emissions as our consumer-centric economy sputtered. But that also sent the voluntary carbon markets into a tailspin, according to a new report released Tuesday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Ecosystem Marketplace.

Voluntary carbon markets, such as the Chicago Climate Exchange, allow companies to trade carbon credits, usually as part of corporate sustainability programs where they pledge to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions by buying offsets tied to forestry programs, the capture of methane gas from landfills, and other efforts. (Such markets should not be confused with mandatory, regulated markets such as the European Trading Scheme.)

“The economic recession had a marked impact on the number of companies offsetting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions,” wrote the report’s authors, who compiled data provided by more than 200 carbon credit suppliers and the carbon exchanges. “In response to the global financial crisis, companies cut back on discretionary funding for corporate social responsibility initiatives, including offsetting emissions. At the same time, the prospects for new compliance demand remained uncertain.”

Still, even in a recession the volume of greenhouse gas emissions traded in 2009 was 39 percent higher than in 2007.

Interestingly, the regulated carbon markets powered through the downturn, growing 7 percent with 8,625 MtCO2e traded at a value of $144 billion, according to the report.

The United States became the world’s biggest supplier of voluntary carbon credits for the first time last year, followed by Latin America and Asia.

Methane-related projects accounted for 41 percent of offset credits while forestry programs were tied to 24 percent of credits and renewable energy to 17 percent.

“Survey respondents were highly positive about the prospects for the global voluntary markets and collectively believe transactions will increase to approximately 400 MtCO2e in 2012, 800 MtCO2e in 2015, and 1,200 MtCO2e in 2020,” the report concluded. “Whether this growth will actually be achieved remains to be seen; it does demonstrate a strong sense of optimism for future activity in the voluntary marketplace.”

About Green Wombat

Green Wombat is written by
Todd Woody, a veteran environmental journalist based in California who writes for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Grist and Yale e360. He's one of the few people on the planet who have held a northern hairy-nosed wombat in the wild.

Todd formerly was a senior editor at Fortune magazine, an assistant managing editor at Business 2.0 magazine and the business editor of the San Jose Mercury News.